Republican governor Mike DeWine, the who co-wrote the bill to reinstate Ohio’s death penalty more than 45 years ago, has called for the state to abolish capital punishment, saying it did not improve public safety and could no longer be morally justified.
“I no longer believe the death penalty is a deterrent to murder,” DeWine said on Tuesday. “The moral justification I had for voting for the death penalty simply no longer exists.”
Tuesday’s announcement represents a change of heart for the 79-year-old governor. After Ohio’s reinstated death penalty law was stuck down in 1978, DeWine, then a newly minted state senator, was instrumental in crafting the 1981 law that survived court challenges and remains in effect. But DeWine has softened his stance in recent years, and repeatedly delayed executions throughout his nearly eight-year tenure as Ohio’s governor.
His call for abolition is consistent with the moderate approach to capital punishment that has defined his time as governor, and it puts him at odds with national Republican leaders like Donald Trump, who has sought to expand the death penalty in his second term.
Human Rights Glance
On Sunday, Israeli settlers torched vehicles and attempted to set fire to a mosque in the West Bank, prompting The Israeli military to deploy troops to quell riots described as violent acts by "Israeli civilians."
The EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas has privately compared Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to apartheid-era South Africa, exposing a sharp contrast between her closed-door remarks and her public support for Israel.
Nearly 100 British MPs and peers have signed a letter calling for an upcoming London event advertising the sale of land in illegal Israeli settlements to be cancelled, warning that it could implicate the UK in international war crimes.
A 20-year-old Palestinian American woman has been held in Israeli military detention for nearly two weeks after Israeli soldiers stormed her family home in a pre-dawn raid on 2 June.
The head of the Palestinian Football Association, Jibril Rajoub, has been denied a visa to enter the US, in the latest case of a senior official being barred from attending the 2026 Fifa World Cup.
The Trump administration has suspended federal funding to Los Angeles’s beleaguered homelessness agency.





























